There’s more to movies than massive franchises. Here are some attention-worthy, under-the-radar films you should totally look out for in theaters and on streaming.
1. Eva Hesse
Barbara Brown / Zeitgeist Films
Artist Eva Hesse was born in Germany in 1936, two years before her family fled the Holocaust and found their way to New York, where she grew up. More than three decades later, she traveled back there in the company of her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, who'd gotten a yearlong artist residency in her home country. She didn't want to go. "It was very hard for her. But Eva wouldn't let an opportunity go by," Hesse's sister, Helen Hesse Charash, says in one of Eva Hesse's many interviews with its subject's friends, family, and admirers. "Eva was a little more of a wife at that point. But all that would change."
Marcie Begleiter's doc about Hesse is a celebration of her work, in particular the stunning post-minimalist sculptures she created out of industrial materials like latex and fiberglass. It was work that made her a major, if difficult to categorize, figure in modern and feminist art. And Eva Hesse makes its way informatively and a touch staidly through Hesse's life, adding Hesse's own voice (through her journals, read by Selma Blair) to the chorus of others describing her development as an artist, her marriage and its end, and her death, of brain cancer, at the age of 34. But it's in tracing how a woman finds her own distinctive voice in an art world full of men so assured they'd be taken seriously that the film really comes into its own, reverberantly depicting how Hesse went from the side room and the supportive role to being the one who was in the spotlight, however briefly.
How to see it: Eva Hesse's now playing in New York and will be making its way around the country — you can find a list of dates and locations here.
2. The First Monday in May
Magnolia Pictures
If you watched the parade of strange and marvelous red carpet looks from the Met Gala on Monday and wondered what the hell the Met Gala even is and why Zayn Malik put on robot arms to attend it, well, this is the film for you.
Page One: Inside the New York Times director Andrew Rossi chronicles the Met's yearlong preparations for its 2015 China: Through the Looking Glass show and the star-studded themed party that accompanies every year's spring exhibit, efforts overseen by curator Andrew Bolton and Vogue commandant Anna Wintour. It's an access-y look at one of the biggest events of the year in fashion, ending with a peek into the Gala itself, where the likes of Justin Bieber and Chloë Sevigny frolic, ambitiously dressed and intriguingly unguarded, and where Rihanna performs "Bitch Better Have My Money" to an audience of finery-clad, awkwardly dancing celebs and other rich people.
If you don't care about fashion — Rossi doesn't push terribly hard to make the behind-the-scenes stuff relevant or compelling to non-fans — there is another issue that unfolds fascinatingly over the course of the film: whether the theme of "the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion" is actually a celebration of Orientalism. Again and again in the doc, in conversations with the Asian art department and with Chinese dignitaries and journalists, the question is raised of what it means to highlight how the West sees China rather than focusing on China itself. It's a question that's averted or fumbled again and again — for example, Wintour at one point asks a Chinese reporter where fashion would be without fantasy, as if "fantasy" is an excuse from all criticism. But eventually, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, who's serving as the exhibit's artistic director, steps in to provide a considered answer. Not only does he manage to out-sunglass Wintour, never once taking his off, he provides understated evidence of how a tightly controlled industry like that of fashion benefits when it's loosed from the iron grip of an exclusive, like-minded few.
How to see it: The First Monday in May is now playing in limited release — check out a list of locations here. It's also available for digital rental.